Unfortunately the SuperPhenix breeder reactor was shut down because its liquid sodium coolant corroded the steel tubings. It was the biggest breeder reactor ever built. Emilio Segre', one of the fathers of nuclear bombs, once told me "Breeders are a folly".
Tullio

They may be currently a folly in terms of economics but not really fraught with technical problems that cannot be worked out. Materials other than sodium can be used for cooling such as lead or heavy water. Quote from Wikipedia:

"The breeding of plutonium fuel in FBRs, known as the plutonium economy, was for a time believed to be the future of nuclear power. It remains the strategic direction of the power program of Japan. However, cheap supplies of 'off the shelf' uranium and especially of enriched uranium have made current FBR technology uncompetitive with PWR and other thermal reactor designs. PWR designs remain the most common existing power reactor type and also represent most current proposals for new nuclear power stations."

Nuclear fuel was cheap and may still be. Westinghouse used to sell it for $6.00 a pound if I remember correctly. There is an enrichment plant in Paducah Kentucky at which the guy who ran cows on my farm in Southern Illinois used to work.

The North Koreans used plutonium in their fizzled underground atomic(nuclear) test--they got this material by way of their nuclear program. They are now trying to restart this breeder which they shut down in exchange for a bribe of 1 million tons of oil

More on the supply of Uranium fuel stock. Quote from Wikipedia

"The world's present measured resources of uranium, economically recoverable at a price of USD$130/kg, are enough to last for some 80 years at current consumption.[2]
In 1983, physicist Bernard Cohen proposed that the world supply of uranium is effectively inexhaustible, and could therefore be considered a form of renewable energy.[4][5] He claims that fast breeder reactors, fueled by naturally-replenished uranium extracted from seawater, could supply energy at least as long as the sun's expected remaining lifespan of five billion years.[4] These reactors use uranium-238, which is more common than the uranium-235 required by conventional reactors."

"The time required for a breeder reactor to produce enough material to fuel a second reactor is called its doubling time, and present design plans target about ten years as a doubling time. A reactor could use the heat of the reaction to produce energy for 10 years, and at the end of that time have enough fuel to fuel another reactor for 10 years."

Cheers,

Bill

Fast breeder reactors can undergo a "nuclear excursion", which is impossible in thermal reactors. There was a fast breeder in Detroit, the Enrico Fermi reactor, which went close to it. A book was written on this incident and is titled "The day we almost lost Detroit".There is another possible nuclear fuel, thorium. The thorium cycle was researched in Italy, then abandoned in favor of slightly enriched uranium, but Nobel prize winner Carlo Rubbia has proposed it again.
Tullio

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I admit I don't fully understand the nuances, but the idea of breeder reactors generating an inexhaustible supply of uranium (in addition to producing energy for public consumption) smacks of the legendary perpetual motion machine.

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Atlanta Bankruptcy, California Bankruptcy, or moral Bankruptcy -- choose your poison.

I admit I don't fully understand the nuances, but the idea of breeder reactors generating an inexhaustible supply of uranium (in addition to producing energy for public consumption) smacks of the legendary perpetual motion machine.

No, they were actually built and worked as prototypes in UK (Dounreay), France (Phenix) and others. But when the first big unit (SuperPhenix) was built it ran into trouble and had to be shut down. As the Enrico Fermi near disaster of 1963 demonstrated, any accident in a breeder can have dangerous consequences, since the nuclear reaction can go explosive. Nobody wants an atomic explosion, even of a small magnitude, in his own backyard, The demise of SuperPhenix, funded by France, Germany and Italy, put a stop to this type of reactor.
Tullio

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Nobody wants an atomic explosion, even of a small magnitude, in his own backyard, The demise of SuperPhenix, funded by France, Germany and Italy, put a stop to this type of reactor.
Tullio

It makes you wonder whether the rush to perfect alternative energy sources will continue in fits and starts, or whether science will be allowed the slow pace it often needs (unfettered by the harsh realities of economics.)

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Atlanta Bankruptcy, California Bankruptcy, or moral Bankruptcy -- choose your poison.

This is anther succesful fusion expt, what i am wondering why are some people getting good results and others no results could it be a phenomenon we don't understand fully or is the science not right or is it the opposition by the oil companies but lets not dismiss it yet remember the first flight expt and the history of the jet engine may be we need to polish thing up a bit.Why are all measuring he-4 arent there supposed to be some emisions?

Japanese scientist claims breakthrough with cold fusion experiment

by Donald Melanson, posted May 26th 2008 at 12:10PM
While recent attempts to create a perpetual motion machine somehow, inexplicably didn't pan out, a physics professor from Osaka University now claims to have made a scientific breakthrough of another sort, with him now touting nothing less than a supposedly successful demonstration of cold fusion. That was apparently done by forcing deuterium gas under pressure into an evacuated cell containing a sample of palladium dispersed in zirconium oxide, which caused the deuterium to be absorbed by the palladium sample, resulting in a denser, or "pynco" deuterium, with deuterium nuclei that are close enough together to fuse. That process also supposedly resulted in a rise in temperature to about 70° Celsius, and a temperature in the center of the cell that remained "significantly warmer" than the cell wall for 50 hours after the test. Of course, there doesn't appear to be any other scientists ready to back up the experiment just yet, so you'll have to rely on your own armchair science expertise to get your hopes up or down accordingly on this one.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

Nuclear power is unsustainable and is nothing more that a boiler system just like a coal plant only a lot more dangerous.

In the 100+ years since the advent of electric power plants we still are forced to use steam power to turn turbines.

I like wind and solar. These 2 power sources aren't always available but in certain areas are easily used and pay for themselves. Whereas, Coal gas oil and nuclear fuel never pay for themselves. fossil fuels leave CO2 in the atomsphere and nuclear leaves spent uranium that needs to be stored for the next few million years.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

since we know the cycles that keep stars burning, i.e hydrogen-helium-carbon

-oxygen-silicon is there a process we could use to reverse one into anther by

distabilizing the nucleus so we can convert one into anther i ask this because

planets like mars and others have alot of silicon we could make alot of oxygen out

there .scientists are concentrating on finding water for the same reason and here

on earth we too have alot of unwanted silicon which we could use for other

purposes.i think we need to start using these wasted elements.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

Why we need to get back to the moon...


Helium-3


The Supply

Some He3 is available on Earth. It is a by-product of the maintenance of nuclear weapons, which would supply us with about 300 kg of He3 and could continue to produce about 15 kg per year. The total supply in the U.S. strategic reserves of helium is about 29 kg, and another 187 kg is mixed up with the natural gas we have stored; these sources are not renewable at any significant rate. In their 1988 paper, Kulcinski, et al., estimate a total of 1,100,000 metric tons of He3 have been deposited by the solar wind in the lunar regolith. Since the regolith has been stirred up by collisions with meteorites, we'll probably find He3 down to depths of several meters. The highest concentrations are in the lunar maria; about half the He3 is deposited in the 20% of the lunar surface covered by the maria.

The Energy

That 1 million metric tons of He3, reacted with deuterium, would generate about 20,000 terrawatt-years of thermal energy. The units alone are awesome: a terrawatt-year is one trillion (10 to 12th power) watt-years. To put this into perspective, one 100-watt light bulb will use 100 watt-years of energy in one year. That's about 10 times the energy we could get from mining all the fossil fuels on Earth, without the smog and acid rain. If we torched all our uranium in liquid metal fast breeder reactors, we could generate about half this much energy, and have some interesting times storing the waste.

The Value

About 25 tons of He3 would power the United States for 1 year at our current rate of energy consumption. To put it into perspective: that's about the weight of a fully loaded railroad box car, or a maximum Space Shuttle payload. To assign an economic value, suppose we assume He3 would replace the fuels the United States currently buys to generate electricity. We still have all those power generating plants and distribution network, so we can't use how much we pay for electricity. As a replacement for that fuel, that 25-ton load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per ton.

The Payoff

A guess is the best we can do. Let's suppose that by the time we're slinging tanks of He3 off the moon, the world-wide demand is 100 tons of the stuff a year, and people are happy to pay $3 billion per ton. That gives us gross revenues of $300 billion a year. To put that number in perspective: Ignoring the cost of money and taxes and whatnot, that rate of income would launch a moon shot like our reference mission every day for the next 10,000 years. (At which point, we will have used up all the helium-3 on the moon and had better start thinking about something else.)

First you need a working fusion reactor. The 500 MW ITER prototype under construction at Cadarache, France, was to be operating in 2016 and is only a prototype. Now it is delayed by three years and its cost has risen from 5 billion euros to 6.2 or 6.6 billion euros (Nature magazine, Vol 453, 12 June 2008). Besides this, fusion reactors do not produce directly electricity, only 14 MeV neutrons, which must be used to heat water under the laws of thermodynamics. Besides this, neutrons are heavy neutral particles which damage every metallic material they impinge on, as demonstrated by the "swelling" phenomenon on fuel rods in fission reactors. I would be surprised if fusion reactors can end being experiments in plasma physics and become practical energy sources.
Tullio

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Inaugurada en Portugal la mayor planta de energía fotovoltaica del mundo:
In Portugal has been unveiled the biggest photovoltaic plant in the world:--->Amareleja (Moura/Portugal)

GUSTAVO CATALÁN DEUS

MADRID.- La empresa española Acciona ha conectado a la red la mayor planta de energía solar fotovoltaica en el mundo, en la localidad portuguesa de Amareleja (Moura). La planta tiene una potencia de 46 Megawatios (Mw) y producirá 93 millones de kilovatios/hora -electricidad que corresponde al consumo de más de 30.000 hogares portugueses- y evitará la emisión de 89.383 toneladas anuales de CO2 en centrales de carbón.

The spanish company ACCIONA has plugged to the grid the biggest photovoltaic plant in the world, in the portuguese town of Amareleja (Moura county). The plant has a performance/power supply of 46 Mw and will produce 93 millions KW/h, which equals the consumption of 30 thousand portuguese average homes and will avoid 89,383 tonns/year of CO2 emissions in coal fueled power stations.

La inversión realizada se eleva 261 millones de euros y las obras se han realizado en un tiempo récord de 13 meses, hasta el pasado día 23, cuando fue definitivamente incorporada a la red eléctrica del país vecino, según fuentes de la compañía, que destaca mundialmente como una de las más pujantes en energías renovables y desalación.

261 million Euros have been spent and the works have been finished in a record time of 13 months, until past December 23rd, when it was definetively plugged to the neighbor country´s power grid,as the sources of the company said, which, as well, is one of the most outstanding companies in renewable energy and desalination processes.

La central solar ocupa una superficie de 250 hectáreas en la circunscripción de Amareleja, perteneciente al concejo de Moura (región del Alentejo), muy cerca de la frontera con España.

The solar plant is allocated on a 250 Hectars area which belongs to the Moura county, in Amareleja, very close to the Spanish borderline.

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Spain is using its sunlight, while Italy does not. I think that Nobel prize winner Carlo Rubbia has gone to Spain to promote solar energy, since he found little support in Italy.
Tullio

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Good discussions here folks.

Here's how it looks to me. Solar still way too expensive compared to coal , nuclear etc. Look at the cost per kilowatt hour of the Portugal plant. I fancy that in time there will be roof shingles that are mass produced from some as yet unperfected material that will provide some good portion of a single family home's energy requirements during the day--this would require --good sunshine and a properly oriented and canted roof for your latitude. Perhaps these can be made cost competitive with electricity from the grid at around 8-10 cents (US) per kilowatt-hr. This may and probably will require subsidy through tax credits or the like.

Safe guards against back charging the power grid when linemen are working will still be a tricky business as it is for any home generator that is connected to the power grid through the homes electrical service wiring.

I, for one, think it is better to go full steam (Ha!) on Nuclear. There are problems there in safety and waste disposal and storage that should be amenable to solution. We will eventually need cheap power to recharge our electric commuter vehicles at night.

Cheers right mateys,

DADDIO

I am paying 8.8 cents (euro) per kWh plus taxes both local and national, plus an added cost for decommissioning spent nuclear reactors. The total is about 19 cents/kWh (euro), that is about 27 US cents. On this scale, solar electricity costs are not so far away and I have seen photovoltaic panels on some villas in my small city (Rodano, near Milano), besides on the huge audience room built by Pier Luigi Nervi in the Vatican City, Rome, This without adding any gas to the atmosphere and any radioactive spent fuel to be managed. Is it worth while to spend a little more money for your electricity bill? You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Tullio

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We'll send it to the sun to help it live longer:)

GREETINGS,
I think we already have the technology to do this and that it could and should be done as far as used fuel rods are concerned. A rod encased in glass (its usual, normal destiny) would be safe enough to "handle" long enough to deal with and would not need to also be placed inside a barrel of concrete for the trip. Possibly quartz would be a slightly superior encasing material. At any rate, a vehicle on a trajectory into the Sun's pull could hold quite a few of these glass spheres.

I don't believe nuclear energy is necessarily a safe effort in the long run. It is very expensive and seems impractical to our intelligence, particularly compared to this kind of activity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace
http://unusual-architecture.com/solar-furnace-odeillo-france/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/f2g2/2749843139/

SOLAR ENERGY is completely benign: it does not have 25,000 years' young consequences. It does not have "half-lives" or lead to them.

signed , "just nuts?"
~: }

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keep telescopic listening devices aimed at the Zenith of the Horizon

If I was Presiddent Obama and I asked how can I DECEASE USA Oil Dependence by 50% in 4 years; How would you advise me and how would you make it work?

Fours years is a very short time especially when a viable non petro source has not been identified, US consumes giga tons of petro . my advice would be to set up a committe to look into the matter and at the end of the day they will have to fund research heavily.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

If I was Presiddent Obama and I asked how can I DECEASE USA Oil Dependence by 50% in 4 years; How would you advise me and how would you make it work?

Tell the auto manufacturers that petroleum fuelled cars will be illegal in four years.

You’d be surprised how fast development in electric and hydrogen powered vehicles, as well as the infrastructure to support them, would evolve when the potential for massive sales are involved.

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

To produce hydrogen you need low cost electricity or high temperature heat. How are you going to produce one or both? Ay, there is the rub!
Tullio

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